A selection of celebrities who survived New York City in the Seventies, including Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers, social commentator Fran Lebowitz and model Beverly Johnson, recall the town's grit and glitz in the new Rolling Stone mini-doc "Gotham at Street Level." The clip coincides with the release of the Martin Scorsese- and Mick Jagger-produced HBO series Vinyl, which is set in New York in 1973.

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"When you walked the streets of New York in the Seventies, you knew you were the shit," Johnson says enthusiastically at one point.

Other talking heads in the documentary short include Legs McNeil, who cofounded Punk magazine and co-authored Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, and Rolling Stone contributing editor Will Hermes, who wrote the 2011 book Love Goes to Buildings On Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever whose subject is the music scene in 1970s New York.